This is posted in the waiting room of an Irish hospital. Interesting glimpse into their culture.
The full text of the poster
This symbol has been developed by the Hospice Friendly Hospitals Programme to respectfully identify the End of Life.
This symbol is inspired by ancient Irish history; it is not associated with any one religion or denomination.
The white spiral represents the interconnected cycle of life, birth, life and death.
The white outer circle represents continuity, infinity and completion.
Purple has been chosen as the background colour as it is associated with nobility, solemnity and spirituality.
In this hospital the symbol may be displayed on a ward to add respect and solemnity during end of life or following the death of one of our patients.
What’s the religion called then? It’s like a Christian being asked what their religion is and answering “monotheism”.
You can’t be serious. Have you never heard of a “pantheon” before?
Also, horribly ironic, since Christianity is actually a family of individual religions. Have you seriously never heard of Roman Catholicism, Methodism, Southern Baptist, Greek Othrodox, etc. ?
Also, various pagan gods often have a central group of worshipers usually referred to as “cults”. Examples would be the Cult of Odin or Cult of Athena. Members of cults primarily worship their chosen deity most people in a given culture wouldn’t be as selective and worship gods when appropriate, like asking Thor for a good harvest.
Granted, this doesn’t exactly apply to Celtic Paganism, but I’d be surprised if a practice common to the Greeks/Romans, Norse, Egyptians, Hindus, Zoroastrians, etc. didn’t also apply
It depends on the coven/group. Celtic pagans call themselves that or sometimes Celtic Wiccans or just pagans.
It’s the pagan beliefs that are rooted in Irish and Welsh history specifically. Then you have different pagan beliefs that are rooted in Norse theology or Greek mythology.
My mom raised me as Wiccan. There’s about as many denominations as there are in the Christian religion.
Edit: Sometimes they’ll even call themselves Druids or follow Druidism.
All of that is about as relevant to celtic paganism as Scientology is to Buddhism.
We don’t know a lot about Celtic paganism, what we do know comes through the filter of the Roman invader and is cursorary. Anyone building a halfway coherent belief system and claiming it as Celtic Paganism is a fraud.
It’s called reconstructionism, and it’s not uncommon in neopagan communities. Most of them are pretty honest with themselves about the limitations of their knowledge. It’s not fraudulent at all.
Anyway, Roman accounts are one source we have for studying celtic culture, but it’s not the only one. There’s also archaeology. There’s some of the mythology that survived. There are old Celtic stories that got christianized by the clerics who recorded them for the first time. There are surviving superstitions and folklore that some ethnologists recorded in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Each of those things provides insights into the beliefs and practices of the pre-christian Celtic civilizations. None of them are a full or a complete picture, nor even all of them together. But if each one together clarifies the picture a little more.
There’s always a limit to how much we can know about prehistoric cultures (in the sense that they had no writing system until converting to christianity). But that doesn’t mean it’s pointless to study them.
Wiccans and Neo-Druids are not Celtic Pagans. They are new age spiritualist nonsense.
Celtic Reconstructionism is the only “authentic” Celtic Pagan religion, based on surviving historical information rather than making up bits and using Celtic flavouring.
Thank you for the informative response. It seems that in this context, “pagan” is less of a religion name and more of a category of otherwise unrelated religions characterized by a mystical connection to nature.
No problem! I think you’re missing that we are saying “Celtic Paganism” and not just pagan.
No I’m not missing that, I’m arguing that it’s the equivalent to saying “American Monotheism” when you mean “Christian”. It strikes me as strange that there’s no, like, actual Celtic word for their belief system/way of life that we could use instead of [Region][Category]
Celtic isn’t a region though, it’s an ethnic group and a language family. “Celtic paganism” typically refers to one of two things: the spiritual beliefs and practices of the historical Celtic civilizations, or the modern reconstruction based on it. It’s fairly specific in that respect.
“Pagan” alone is a large umbrella, and most modern pagans will acknowledge that, but often they’ll differentiate themselves as “Celtic pagan” or “Norse pagan” or “Greek pagan” or whathaveyou.
But historically, there wasn’t much of a point to naming one’s religion, because even if they had contact with different cultures, they were distinguished by their ethnic groups/language families, and their religion was as indistinguishable from those things as any other aspect of culture.
That was long before the modern day, when civilizations now have more heterogeneity and thus distinctions such as language, culture, ethnicity, religion, cuisine, etc., each refer to unique sets of characteristics that can blend in various ways within a multicultural society in a globalized world.
Many if not most religions historically didn’t have a word for their particular belief system; the scholarly name for Germanic paganism is “Germanic paganism” because pre-Christian Germans didn’t have a name for their shared beliefs. Sometimes you may see neologisms or names for neopagan movements applied to the now-dead religion — I’ve seen Germanic neopaganism (aka “Heathenry”)'s less commonly-used “Asatru” used for the original religion in a game. Same with others like “Kemetism”, which refers to the neopagan movement and not the ancient Egyptian religion.
Not a historical scholar but, to my understanding, for a lot of folks “what’s your religion” would have been a nonsensical question because that’s just how the world works and you wouldn’t think of it as being a belief system separate from physically evident reality. Folks are free to correct me on that.
“Celtic Paganism” would be more akin to “Catholicism”. It’s a sect or branch of Paganism.
Like how Catholicism is a branch of Christianity
To be fair, Catholicism is a famously singular religion.
Not really. You have Roman Catholicism, Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox…
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Not really - that’s more like saying “European polytheism” when you mean paganism.
Though I do believe there are non-European traditions that might call themseves pagan. But then again, christianity is also not confined to America.
The term “pagan” originally meant “anything other than christian.” Maybe before that it meant something like “country bumpkin,” referring to people who lived outside the cities and major towns. The meaning changed as population centers converted faster than rural areas.
It originated in Europe though, so obviously it’s more deeply rooted in European paganism and other cultures that had close contact, like Egypt and Anatolia.
Further removed cultures probably didn’t/don’t think of themselves as pagan. For example, a Shinto priest probably doesn’t call himself pagan. There’s no cultural reason to.
But that sorta breaks down when you look at post-colonized cultures, where the cultural cross-pollination lent the word pagan to their cultural identity. For instance, some followers of Native American spirituality refer to themselves as pagan. It’s a way of reclaiming the term, which was originally used to exclude and oppress them, but now it just frightens christians. A lot of people who call themselves pagan use the term that way deliberately.
Ancient Irish and Welsh ‘pagans’ worshiped entirely different pantheons from each other. ‘Celtic’ paganism is a pretty meaningless term.
Also, everything we know about the druids was written down by Julius Caesar, and - given that he wrote it as a justification for annihilating them - there is absolutely no reason to believe he was even attempting to tell the truth.
I’m talking about neo-paganism and modern religions.
It’s more like a Christian being asked what their religion is, and answering “Southern Baptist/First United Methodist/Lutheran/etc”. Every religion has denominations, and Celtic Pagan is an ancient denomination of paganism.